I asked Aaron Wall about it, and apparently their SEO Book private forum’s got some good discussions on it. One idea Aaron favoured from those discussions was the idea that Google has trouble distinguishing between legit brands and entities with generic names. Hence boosting exact matches, to help small brands out.

From what I understood of Bill Slawski’s overview, a Named Entity is basically a proper noun.

Remember Grade 2 English class? Yep, the interweb’s g33k3d out proper nouns with full-on algos to better index data about them and so forth. Check out Bill’s post for more, and share your thoughts there or here on what this acquisition means for future ranking fluctuations.